Dueling With A Demon
by The Walking Stranger
Summary: Crossover with Stephen King's "The Stand" If you haven't read it, don't worry After narrowly escaping death once again, Randall Flagg finds himself weakened in a world filled with mystical objects of immense power. His goal is simple: gather them all and create destruction The only thing standing in his way are the Xiaolin Monks, and his partner-in-crime, Jack's stupidity


**_A/N:_ Like the summary says, this is a crossover with the Stephen King mythos, primarily one of my all-time favorite books: King's 1978 novel The Stand. Events from The Gunslinger will probably be mentioned, but nothing to worry about if you've not yet indulged in it. We choose not to actually classify this as a crossover because The Stand has so few works on this site, and my beta said we could do it after this has gathered some attention.**

**If you haven't read The Stand... it doesn't really matter. Whatever happened to Randall Flagg in it is either not planned to be mentioned or is talked about to a point where you can basically deduce what he did in it if it even holds any significance to this story. I would like to thank my beta and writing partner DaOneInDaCorner. Thanks man. I believe you have a note of your own?**

**_DaOneInDaCorner:_ I guess I'm happy to be working on it and would appreciate any feedback anyone wants to give me on my editing, even if it's bad feedback.**

**XXXXXX**

He heard himself groan.

He opened his eyes.

There was a partially cloudy but pleasant blue sky above him. His arms were out at his sides. He moved them so he could push up into a sitting position. His legs were flat on the ground before him. He saw that he had sharp-toed cowboy boots on. Along with them, he had on sand-caked, worn jeans. He looked down and saw that he was wearing a jacket identical to the garbs covering his legs. Under that was a long sleeved button-up checkered shirt. His head was killing him. He groaned again and pressed his left hand hard into his temple. He felt as though he were hung-over. Just then, painful memories began to flood into his mind. His death...

"Oh that Goddamn..." he said as his eyes narrowed. His words would have felt like ice, had anyone been around to hear him. He decided to put his immeasurable anger aside for now. He stood up and dusted himself off.

For the first time since waking, he felt something in the left pocket of his jacket. Pulling out the mysterious object, he found himself staring at an extremely tacky and ugly looking pair of glasses, with a frame the color of bronze and the lenses looking similar to that of a fly's eye, a crystal-like mineral substituting the lenses themselves.

Attached to it was a small note. He read it out loud. "With love. Tommy." He raised an eyebrow. "Who the hell is Tommy?" Realizing he had no way of figuring it out, and that it hardly mattered at the moment, he shrugged his shoulders and put the glasses back into the pocket he had drawn them from. He rubbed his head again. It wasn't hard to guess why he was so sore. Death tended to cause pain to those it happened to. He let out a sigh and looked in all directions. He saw what he expected to see; nothing but desert as far as even a sorcerers eyes could see. He felt beads of sweat drag themselves down his face. He wiped them away with the back of his right hand and then used his fingers as a visor as he looked upwards towards the sun, blinding as ever. He looked back to the horizon endless and flat aside from a few sand-dunes and plateaus. He considered changing into his crow form, but ultimately decided against it. Flying would accomplish little and would just waste what little energy he had.

"Well... best get busy walking or get busy roasting," Randall Flagg, the dark man, said to himself with defeat. He looked in different random directions, not to see if he saw something out of place, but to choose one at random. Coming to his decision, Flagg turned on his heels. He wasn't even one step forward when his face slammed into something solid. His eyes closed from the stinging, he rubbed his eyes and mouth. "It just isn't my day, is it?"

He removed his hands from his somewhat better face and was extremely surprised by what he saw. It was a door. A normal wooden door, like one that lead to a middle-class bedroom. His eyebrows raised to the highest possible position. It wasn't connected to any wall, it was just the door alone, standing upright. Curiosity seized him and he slowly walked to its side, not taking his eyes off it, as if he was worried it would attack him. There was nothing on the other side. It really was just a door there in the middle of a seemingly endless sea of sand and sun.

"Ooohhhhh... 'kay then." He walked back to the side he had run into seconds ago. He looked down to the knob. It was a stainless steel globe. Again, he felt a playful need to see all that was going on and grabbed hold of it. He took in a deep breath and turned it. He expected it to be empty, and just more of the desert in the doorway. He could not have been more inaccurate. It was a blinding light. He squinted his eyes to protect his vision. On an impulse he reached forward and felt his arm go through the shiny veil as if nothing were there. With his limb still in the light, he looked over his shoulder back to the infinite sand, and he looked back into the yellowish-white wall before him. He didn't know why, but he felt as if this led somewhere. Somewhere far away. Somewhere much more preferable. He raised his right foot, preparing to step through. A thought suddenly came to him, and a smile crossed his lips. "If I don't like it there, I can just step back on through."

He walked into the light, and was instantly mesmerized after two steps. Tall, very tall buildings covered the ground. Everything sounded lively and complicated. It all seemed to have a grey coloring to it. Other people constantly walked past him, a few occasionally bumping into him but paying no mind to it. He didn't like being surrounded like this, and he noticed that the street was far emptier than the sidewalk he was standing on, so he chose to dart into it and let his thoughts clear, even if it was for just a brief moment. After all, streets were always empty where he came from. He was standing there, breathing heavily when he heard a screech of sorts. He turned around and saw a car roaring towards him. Flagg yelped and ran back towards the door he had walked through. Instead, his face collided with a solid brick wall.

"What? No." He ran his hands all over the area he could reach. He looked up along the wall, as if the door had somehow gone upwards. It had not. It was gone. His ticket back to the desert, his realm, had vanished. "The door! Where... WHERE'S THE DOOR!?" He began panting. After a few moments, he felt uncomfortable, and his head slowly turned to show him that several strangers had stopped to stare at him. When they saw he was now staring back with wide eyes, they all continued on their merry way. He removed his now raw hands from the bricks and again dusted himself off, regaining what little composure he had left. 'So now I'm stuck here.' Flagg thought with irritation.

"No reason I can't have some fun while I'm here though," he said with a smirk. He glanced at a young man, probably college-age, and... nothing happened.

'What the?' Flagg thought to himself with shock. 'He should be dead of an aneurysm! Or at the very least dead...'

He held out his hand, palm towards the sky, and focused. Again, nothing happened. His ability to control lightning was gone. He closed his eyes tightly and concentrated, but his prophetic abilities were evidently absent as well. He let out a deep sigh and let his back come to rest on the wall and he tried his temples, trying to figure everything out. He walked down the sidewalk and after about thirty feet turned into an alley. As he continued to stare at the ground, he stopped dead in his tracks when he heard a clang in front of him. Curiosity got the better of him (once again) and he looked up slightly, and caught sight of something rather strange, yet still, oddly hypnotizing.

It was a crown, or at least looked like one, with a bronze tone that looked similar to the strange spectacles he'd found earlier. Four crystals stuck onto the edges of the crown, and spikes that stuck upward from the head of the crown completed the image.

"Don't know what it is, but I know what I like," Flagg said with a grin as he walked over to it. As soon as he wrapped his long fingers around the spike closest to him, it began to glow with a golden aura. He was bemused by this. He looked over slightly and saw that someone else had grabbed hold of his royal prize. It was full-on yellow, skin-wise. This caught his full attention, and then he heard a voice that could get very annoying very quickly.

"Excuse me sir, but this artifact is of grave importance to me and my friends. May I have it?"

Flagg looked up and saw a rather uncanny person. It was a boy, probably just barely in his teens, if that. His head was perfectly round like a ball, and was completely yellow like his hand. His eyes were solid black and he had nine symmetrical dots on his forehead, three in a row going up and down and sideways.

"Lemme think on that. No." He rose to his full height, lifting the crown, and the boy along with it. Flagg found this very amusing. They continued talking as the boy dangled from the crown. "I found it, and nobody else is claiming it."

The kid sighed. "Please sir, I do not wish to take it from you by force."

Nobody can be sure why Flagg lost his self-control then. Perhaps he just found the very thought of a small, high-pitched boy who barely came up to his kneecaps could force the mighty dark man to do ANYTHING extremely hilarious. Or maybe he was so enraged and frightened by the loss of his powers that he came full circle. Whatever the reason, his composure had disappeared.

"Ha." His face remained neutral. "Haha." His lips began to curl. "AHAHAHA!" His grip on his crown turned into a vice; his mind still had some control inwardly. After several seconds, it escalated to the point where his back was arched and his chest heaving. Finally, he lost his breath and his sternum began to ache. He placed a hand on his stomach and rapidly began to pant. he felt a small weight drop from him and a metallic clank sound on the ground. He stopped breathing heavily and looked down. The weird spectacles he had found earlier had fallen out of his pocket and were glowing on the ground with a golden aura, exactly like the crown.

He heard the annoying animated cheese-ball speak again. "A-ha! A Shen Gong Wu!" Flagg looked back to him with a bemused grin. The kid had an overconfident smile and his eyes shined like obsidian marbles.

Flag raised his left foot and brought it down onto the glasses with enough force to keep them there should anyone attempt to snatch them, but not enough pressure to break them.

Omi smiled at the strange man who looked out of place in the metropolis the other monks called New York City. "Now I do not need to force you to give up the Fountain of Hui! I will simply defeat you effortlessly in a Xiaolin Showdown!"

The dark man didn't know what on Earth the child was talking about, but it was still laughable. Even without his powers, Flagg was still a very fit almost-immortal man. He maintained control and gave the very irritating kid a friendly smile. "Yeah, sure, why not?"

Omi's smile broadened. "Excellent!" He reached into his pocket and pulled out his latest Shen Gong Wu. "My Serpent's Tail against your..." His egotistical grin wavered and he looked down to the Wu beneath his foe's worn-in boot, which reminded him of Clay's own pair. "What Shen Gong Wu is that?"

"The Crystal Glasses," said a familiar dragon behind Omi. The Dragon of the Water looked over his shoulder and smiled. His four friends, Raimundo, Clay, Kimiko, and Dojo had finally caught up to him. The latter continued. "I recognize them, but I wonder why I didn't sense them activate..."

Raimundo leaned closer to Clay and said quietly to him: "Who is this guy? I've never seen him before."

"I dunno," Clay said back to Raimundo. The stranger challenging Omi gave off such a chilling and ominous feeling that Clay couldn't even say a metaphor to describe him.

Meanwhile, back at the ensuing action, Omi was again grinning broadly. "Very well then Ja-" He cut himself off. He was so used to having Showdowns with Jack Spicer, but this wasn't the self-proclaimed Evil Boy Genius. This man, this impossible-to-determine-an-accurate-age of a man was much more... impending. Omi's confidence in his own abilities snuffed out his doubts, and he gave the stranger an innocent smile. "Excuse me sir, but we did not formally introduce ourselves. I am Omi, Xiaolin Dragon of the Water. And you are...?"

The dark man gave his adversary another friendly smile as he bent down and grabbed his 'Crystal Glasses,' as they were apparently called, from beneath his boot. "You can call me Flagg. Randall Flagg. With the double 'G' in the last name and double 'L' in the first."

"Wonderful!" Omi said, excitement of the coming battle filling him. His smile went from innocent to arrogant. "Randall Flagg, I challenge you to a Xiaolin Showdown! My Serpent's Tail against your Crystal Glasses!"

XXXXXX

Jack Spicer and Wuya were watching the entire ordeal from a rooftop, keeping quiet.

"Who is this guy?" Jack half-shouted. "And what's he doing with my Wu?"

"Hush now, Jack," Wuya said. "Don't you know that the enemy of your enemy is your friend?" The ghostly Heylin witch focused on the man dressed almost entirely in jean fabric. She could feet the evil and the malice in him. "Besides, I feel this... Randall Flagg could be a very useful ally to us."

XXXXXX

Flagg's kindly smile remained on his veneer. "Alright then, Omi. I accept this... Showdown." Flagg didn't want to even bother attempting to pronounce the first word.

"The game is hide and seek. The Fountain of Hui hides somewhere in the city, and the first one to find it wins!"

'Sounds easy enough.' Flagg thought to himself. "Alright again."

"Let's go!" Omi shouted. "XIAOLIN SHOWDOWN!"

**XXXXXX**

**A/N: I can already see how hard it's gonna be to put a Showdown in writing...**


End file.
